Open Web

Some of the best things in life happen when you least expect them. Suddenly they are right here and you’re happy. That is especially true to things you loved dearly in the past but disappeared months before without warning. Like Ma.gnolia, the small but beautiful and elegant bookmarking service. Needless to say, the tweet by Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff got me really excited.

I don’t want to recap the reasons why Ma.gnolia went offline earlier this year. Instead head over to CrunchGear and read the interview with Larry Halff or do some research yourself. You know, there are those really useful sites out there called search engines.

It’s Social

Those of you who never heard about Ma.gnolia before may ask what’s so special about it. It’s only a social bookmarking service, right? And there’s Delicious, the grand daddy of social bookmarking.

Well, Ma.gnolia isn’t just storing all of your bookmarks. The real value of the service are its social features. There are groups dealing with all kinds of topics (well, currently there aren’t many as Ma.gnolia’s user base is still small after the relaunch but in the past there were countless), so you can see what other users think is relevant and interesting about the topics and issues you care or want to know more about.

Also I’m glad that one feature has survived: Giving thanks to other users for adding a bookmark to Ma.gnolia. They found an interesting link on the web, donated some time to add tags and maybe a description to it, so you can easily add it to your bookmark collection. Just show some appreciation for a great link. It’s the small things that make life great.

Open Standards

Since I’m a supporter of open standards, it’s great to know that Ma.gnolia is still relying on them. It supported many of them before its demise already.

You want to sign in to Ma.gnolia? Better have an OpenID. There is no way to sign in with a username and password. Also no Twitter logins, no Facebook Connect. Well, those login methods might be options to think about but I guess Larry Halff rather stays with more open methods like OpenID.

Also all important information is marked up with microformats, from user profiles, to contacts, to bookmarks, to tags,… Ma.gnolia has them all. Also users can subscribe to groups, tags, and people by RSS.

If you want to know more about the standards Ma.gnolia is using, have look at a small article I wrote about the topic last year. Most of them are still there.

If you think these standards are just some geeky additions, you might want to think again. When Ma.gnolia disappeared users couldn’t access the service anymore and their bookmarks were unavailable. But due to those standards users could find them elsewhere on the internet and restore at least a great part of them. That’s not replacing a backup strategy, of course. But if the bookmarks were hiding behind a walled garden, they were gone. All of them, forever. I’m using Delicious to back up my bookmarks, by the way.

The Not So Relevant Service for Readers

Alright, the headline is a joke but read on. If you’re using both Ma.gnolia and Google Reader you might want to add Ma.gnolia to the Send to list of Google Reader, so you can easily bookmark you favorite articles when reading your feed items. Just head over to the settings page of Google Reader and add the necessary information:

Currently users need to sign up for an invitation to Ma.gnolia. But please do yourself a favor and check it out. You might like it.

Update Oct 6: Since yesterday Ma.gnolia is just called Gnolia because another company is claiming the name.

Just drop the ma. everywhere (e.g. in your Google Reader settings) and you should be able to use Gnolia just like before. However if you use an OpenID Provider that supports directed identity (e.g. Yahoo! and Google) you have to re-associate your OpenID with Gnolia. Just go to http://gnolia.com/recover and recover your account. Delete the OpenID from your settings and re-associate it. In the case of directed identity the OpenID Provider issues a unique URL for each Relying Party. Ma.gnolia and Gnolia are seen as different websites by those providers.

Thanks to Larry Halff for providing fast support and dealing with this issue last night!